A new approach to detecting and designing living structure of urban environments

Bin Jiang,Ju-Tzu Huang

doi:10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2021.101646

Bin Jiang, Ju-Tzu Huang

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2021.101646

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Journal: Urban Systems	Publication Date: Apr 18, 2021
Citations: 17	License type: cc-by

Affiliation: University of Gävle, National Taipei University

Abstract

Sustainable urban design or planning is not a LEGO-like assembly of prefabricated elements, but an embryo-like growth with persistent differentiation and adaptation towards a coherent whole. The coherent whole has a striking character – called living structure – that consists of far more small substructures than large ones. To detect the living structure, natural streets or axial lines have been previously adopted to be topologically represent an urban environment as a coherent whole. This paper develops a new approach to detecting the underlying living structure of urban environments. The approach takes an urban environment as a whole and recursively decomposes it into meaningful subwholes at different levels of hierarchy (or scale) ranging from the largest to the smallest. We compared the new approach to natural street and axial line approaches and demonstrated, through four case studies, that the new approach is better and more powerful. Based on the study, we further discuss how the new approach can be used not only for understanding but also – probably more importanly – for effectively designing or planning an urban environment to be living or more living.

Highlights

Sustainable urban design or planning is not an assembly of prefabricated elements, like LEGO, but an embryo-like growth with persistent differentiation and adaptation towards a coherent whole (Alexander 1987, 2002–2005)
Implications of the new approach on sustainable urban design or planning The new approach to detecting living structure begins with a space and decomposes it, according to its inherent hierarchy, into many substructures at different levels of hierarchy or scale with far more smalls than larges
Built on the growth view of sustainable urban design or planning, this paper develops a new approach to detecting the underlying living structure of an urban environment

Summary

Introduction

Sustainable urban design or planning is not an assembly of prefabricated elements, like LEGO, but an embryo-like growth with persistent differentiation and adaptation towards a coherent whole (Alexander 1987, 2002–2005). Regardless of this, we still can apply the head/tail breaks to the gray image to get multiple averages recursively (Table 1), from which we chose a meaningful value (171) somewhere around the second mean for delineating the smallest substructures (Figure 4f) From these smallest substructures, large substructures at different levels of scale or hierarchy can be created by merging the small scales (Figure 4b–4e). The overall shape of the city of London looks like a fish, but the organic or living nature of the environment lie in its substructures, with far more smalls than larges.

City of London

Findings

Conclusion